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Investing in a Post-COVID World; Exploring the Pandemic’s Impact on Gender Equity
Clubs News
The global pandemic has reshaped the world, and investors and founders are full of questions about the future of startups. To find answers, the HBS Alumni Angels Association, in partnership with the Stanford Angels, convened the top thought leaders in the field of entrepreneurship for the landmark virtual conference, “Emerge Stronger: Lessons from the Pandemic for Investors and Entrepreneurs,” held May 12 and 13.
More than 350 people around the globe took a virtual front-row seat for the event, which featured the foremost experts on entrepreneurship and investing at HBS: Howard H. Stevenson, Sarofim-Rock Baker Foundation Professor, Emeritus; Bill Sahlman Baker Foundation Professor, Emeritus; Tom Eisenmann, Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration; and Mitch Weiss, Professor of Management Practice. Another 20 leading investors and entrepreneurs spoke on panels and in private break-out sessions to round out the conference, which was timed in three-hour blocks over the two days to accommodate attendees from coast to coast and Europe.
Conference co-hosts and organizers Jean Kovacs (MBA 1985) and Jason Klein (MBA 1986), co-presidents of HBS Alumni Angels, worked closely with the club’s CMO, Steve Kirschner (MBA 1986), VP of Community, Joseph Wehbe (GMP 23), and club administrator, Molly Lyons, to organize the event during the spring. Kovacs said the timing and the topic of the conference could not have been better, and the response by both the presenters and the audience far exceeded expectations.
“We needed something positive,” says Kovacs, an angel investor and former CEO and cofounder of Comergent Technologies. “We just went through this really tough year on all levels, personally and professionally. Our theme, Emerge Stronger, really spoke to people. The speakers we attracted were just mind-blowing! I think we hit on something unique here by looking back on the year with positivity and asking, ‘what did we learn?’”
Howard Stevenson and Bill Sahlman
The conference kicked off with Professors Stevenson and Sahlman presenting a master class on the pandemic’s lessons for entrepreneurs and investors. The virtual format allowed the audience a unique opportunity to interact with these world-class faculty members, who shared their insights in an hour-long conversation.
“It was a rare treat to be able to spotlight Howard Stevenson, who is legend in HBS entrepreneurship,” says Klein, founder and CEO of On Grid Ventures. “Having a remote audience tuning in from all over the world—he was thrilled, as they all were.”
Thematically, the conference aimed to explore the major challenges of angel investing, managing and growing through a pandemic, as well as expanding opportunity for diverse founders and funders, confronting racial justice, and harnessing public entrepreneurship to address societal challenges.
Jean Kovacs, Jim Breyer, Ann Miura-Ko, Jason Green, Lulu Curiel, Max Tuchman, Frederik Groce, Maria Salamanca, Brian Patterson, Alice Vilma
Professor Eisenmann gave a presentation based on his book, Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success, and Professor Weiss presented a session based on his book, We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems.
“Everything was very timely,” says Klein. “We talked about racial justice and inclusion. We had the CEO’s of startups speaking. We had two of the best business books to talk about. Entrepreneurship has completely changed over the last decade. It used to be something you considered late in your career. Now it’s more of an academic discipline. There’s so much to be studied and learned.”
Kovacs adds that the investors and entrepreneurs on the panels were all “rock stars,” sharing invaluable firsthand knowledge with an audience of investors, entrepreneurs, academics, and students.
The response from attendees has been very positive. “Listening to Tom Eisenmann analyze, methodically and with a very practical framework, why startups fail, was both convincing and enlightening,” says Etienne Deffarges (MBA 1985), cofounder and partner at Chicago Pacific Founders. “Starting the conference with this was a brave move by the conference organizers—who wants to dwell on failures?—but a highly successful one.”
Mary Ann Byrnes (MBA 1984), CEO of Alto Impact Consulting in California, came away inspired. “This was a group of speakers that was unlike anything I’ve seen before,” she says. “World class professors Howard, Bill, Tom—who literally wrote the books on entrepreneurship—offered fresh perspectives for investors after the pandemic and for entrepreneurs looking for funding. What I loved most about this world-class event was that the Angels Conference showcased an extremely diverse, successful set of investors who offered important insights and real-world advice. I think attendees got to see both the best, and the future, of entrepreneurial investing. It was inspiring.” Byrnes adds that she identified people she wants to invest with, as well as a “dream team” of investors for her companies in the future.
That kind of result is something the HBS Alumni Angels team hopes to replicate. “Of course we want to present another conference,” says Kovacs. “This one was really amazing. Can lightning strike twice?”
The organizers worked steadily with HBS, Stanford and the conference sponsors—Gunderson Dettmer, Hillsven, General Atlantic and ULU Ventures—for three months to create the landmark conference. The full recording of the program is available at hbsangels.com/annual-conference.
When the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap Report came out at the end of March, the news was grim. The significant economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic stretched the global gap by an entire generation.
“Last year, we were a mere 99.5 years from real gender equity,” says Heather Stark (MBA 1999). “Now, one year and a pandemic later, it will take 135.6 years—36 years longer—to reach gender equity.”
That one, daunting statistic became the impetus for Stark and the HBS Club of Toronto to present a virtual panel discussion, “The Impact of the Pandemic on Gender Equity: Can We Regain the Lost Ground?” held on May 12.
The club has always been active in supporting women leaders in the HBS alumni community with events, initiatives and social impact scholarships. So when Club President Boris Tsimerinov (PLDA 16) and Stark were planning events for 2021, they decided to organize something useful for both women and men who want to do more to eliminate discrimination. The pair worked with club sponsor Faye Thorek of Thorek/Scott and Partners to produce the virtual panel event.
Stark, an executive coaching and leadership development consultant and founder and president of Stark Coaching, served as moderator of the panel, which included Penny Collenette, Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa and a visionary founder of The Prosperity Project; Jen Lee Koss (MBA 2008), founding partner of Springbank Collective; and Michelle Banik, a human resources consultant and former Chief People Officer for OMERS, one of Canada’s largest defined benefit plans.
“We thought we could use our voices to talk, not just about women in the boardrooms and as leaders, but women as a whole,” says Stark. “Because if we don’t help women as a whole, none of us are moving forward.
After an introduction by Tsimerinov, the panel laid out the sobering facts about the pandemic’s impacts on the working women of Canada: More women than men left careers as schools shut down to care for families. Twice as many women as men applied for Canada’s child care benefit. The country’s economy lost more than 800,000 jobs.
“The women who were disproportionately affected by the pandemic were the ones that weren’t earning much to begin with— they’re the ones bearing the brunt of the job losses and they make up the majority of the workforce in the hardest-hit sectors like hospitality, retail and food service,” says Stark. “Nearly 100,000 working-aged Canadian women have completely left the workforce during the pandemic. The figure for men is a tenth of that, so there’s a very different impact on men and women.”
Michelle Banik, Heather Stark, Penny Collenette, Jen Lee Koss
The panelists each shared a different approach to address the widening gap in gender equity. Collenette said The Prosperity Project, a nonprofit established during the pandemic to specifically work to stem the adverse impacts of COVID-19 on women, aims to provide Canadian women with advocacy, mentoring, and resources, while also conducting research and tracking the status of women to get a clear view of the depth and breadth of the challenges they face.
“We’re one of very few nonprofits actually founded during COVID,” said Collenette, a longtime champion of women and childcare reform in Canada, who has served in both government and the private sector. “Our goals are to track the data, uncover unconscious bias, support women to stay in the workforce, and shine a spotlight on STEM and skilled workers.”
Collenette also shared data on the “too incremental” progress of women in Canada historically, and the loss of political ground women suffered over the past year.
Panelist Jen Lee Koss said the Springbank Collective, a coalition of investors seeking to eliminate the gender gap, believes the “gender equity lens” for investing is a gateway to bigger themes, such as the future of work, the aging population, and the work productivity revolution at home.
“Women, on average, were already doing twice as much unpaid care in the home as men before the pandemic, and then, since COVID, they were leaving the workplace in droves,” she said. “It has affected women of color more. And, for every woman who dropped out last month, there were 2.2 men going back to work. Women aren’t returning, and that’s a problem.”
Koss said Springbank is launching a State of Care Report in partnership with Pivotal Ventures to assess the care market and its future growth, while also looking at household management and aging-in-place trends. “It’s a hopeful time to be thinking about innovation in the care space,” she said. “We cannot unsee what COVID has revealed.”
After Stark noted that “most of Canada’s largest companies have no women of color in line for senior executive roles,” panelist Michelle Banik spoke about the need for companies to build inclusive cultures. She said it requires commitment from top leadership, an understanding of the current talent landscape in order to create strategies, and a willingness to listen, learn, and sometimes unlearn to better understand lived experiences. “Building an inclusive culture is about building a learning culture,” she said. “Leaders need to do the work, even if it’s hard.”
The conversation covered a range of issues, including the new $30B Canadian child care budget, which Collenette called “potentially transformative,” the likelihood that work-from-home arrangements will persist, the ways men can support and sponsor women in the workplace, and how a “she-covery” will require support for women at every level of the labor force.
“We really are at a turning point for the global economy,” Collenette adds. “Post-pandemic, either we fashion a world where women take their rightful place in every seat at every table or we fail. But, as Harvard alums know, failure is not an option.”
A robust question-and-answer session followed the discussion. “It was excellent to hear the panelists’ perspectives on what both women and men can do to accelerate the pace of change and close the gender gap,” says Tsimerinov. “The pandemic has helped women in one way: We are starting to understand, finally, the extent of the work that women do in the home, the invisible unpaid labor, and the emotional labor. We need to take what has been unearthed in the past 15 months and use it to build for the future,” says Stark. “Hopefully the conversation resonated with people and galvanizes them into action.”
The recorded panel discussion is available here.
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